1666 Isaac
Newton was looking at Optics when he discovered the Spectrum. Split out 7
colours, he chose 7 as there are 7 musical notes.

This led to
the idea of the colour wheel. This developed in to colour theory.

Colour is a
fantastic tool.

Las Vegas
uses colour to draw your attention to suck the money out of your pockets.

Colour
theory: 3 primary colours (fundamental). The colour wheel helps us pick
complimentary colours. Complimentary colours are those that are on the opposite
side of the colour wheel. Orange & Blue contrast nicely. Used in film
posters a lot sun / sky.

When
picking colours you have to be careful about the perception of colour. Colour
should always enhance the visualisation.

People see
colours differently. Should we use Red / Green? We understand Red is Bad and
Green is Good. MF’s says yes you can use it. If you use it for yourself but if
it goes public then you should avoid it. You can use high contrasting colour.

Use
vischeck.com to check your visualisations for colour blind tests. Stepped
colour makes it easier to use as tone can be distinguished.

Colour has
associations and so can act as a short cut. Colour is one of the first things
we see so those associations happen before we have read the content.

New style
of work – free, independent from the Corporate fixed roles where you are
passionate for what you do

Books
include: “A whole new mind”, “Drive”

Today’s
session we will look at “what motivates us” from a data driven perspective

Two types
of knowledge: 1. Explicit knowledge (you know it and can show it) 2. Implicit
knowledge (you know it but you don’t know you know it)

The laws of
motivation are very evident. If you reward behaviour you get more of it. If you
punish behaviour, you get less of it. You don’t need a hypothesis to test to
understand this. If your unlying laws are a little off then you will misread
situations. Punishing behaviour doesn’t always result in less of that
behaviour.

4
economists did 9 tests in America and India. Everyone was treated the same way
across a series of challenges except the reward they were given. Participants
got 3 different levels of reward for good performance. India’s reward was a lot
higher relatively. For mechanical tasks the highest reward group performed the
best. “But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger
reward led to poorer performance”

Controlling
contingent reward – if / then rewards – great for simple and short term work. Humans
love rewards (it’s the definition of the word!). Rewards get our attention and
focus. If / then rewards are not great for long term and complex tasks. Great
for algorthymic tasks (ie follow a simple set of steps). If you are solving a
creative task then you need an expansive view where you don’t have that
laser-beam focus where you narrow your thinking. This contradicts our Implicit
knowledge so this is why we don’t find this in every day society.

Animals are
implicitly aware of fairness. If you have uneven pay levels, you will get
rebellion. You have to pay people enough.

If you are
getting people to do long term complex work, then you want them to stop
thinking about the money

Autonomy,
Mastery and Purpose – are the 3 key elements of work

1. Autonomy
– let’s think about management – DP argues that management is a technology
designed in the 1850s to produce improvements in task completion. You still
need compliance but people don’t produce their great work when they are
compliant, they do it when they are ‘engaged’. 2 in 10 people are actively
disengaged in the workforce. You have to have sovereignty for your employees if
you want engagement.

Zappos is
the extremem version where there is no hierarchy or management.

Netflix is
less extreme – their expense policy is “Act in Netflix’s best interest”

If you have
autonomy on Time, Technique, Team and Task then this sovereignty gives you much
higher engagement.

Atlassian –
Australian Software company. Each week you have a ‘Ship It’ where devs work on
what they want as long as they show it to the rest of company

Columbia
Credit Union – one manager gives an hour each week to go and do something
different than answer the phone. Called the ‘Genius Hour’

Manchester
University – have ‘Friday Evening Experiments’ that “You’re allowed to do
whatever you want as long as it is not boring” – no funding just try stuff. Led
to Graphene discovery and a Nobel Prize.

So the message
is carve out a few ‘Islands of autonomy’ – create space to try something
different.

2. Mastery –
“making progress in meaningful work” has been found as the key element.
Feedback is vital to showing the progress is being made. Millennials have grown
up where they have information at their fingertips the whole time. In
organisations, the feedback disappears and is done every 6 months.

Two ideas –
1. weekly one-on-ones with a twist. Every monthly meeting ask ‘Love and Loathe’
rather than what you are working on. Career long term or Removing Barriers. 2.
Progress Rituals – Humans create rituals to understand the world. Write down 3
good things that happened each day.

3. Purpose –
How / Why – if you are struggling and find out the How it gets focus. Why gives
the focus as it creates a purpose to deliver against. Have 2 fewer
conversations about How and have 2 conversations about Why.

We have the
chance to run organisations that work with the grain of how humans work.

Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Preface: There are not enough words that I can use to describe this session. The experimental work done by these amazing Tableau Zens is phenomenal. I have given hints at what the content is below but until you see some of the techniques the team have come up with, you can only use your imaginations. That is what this session is about. Using the fundamentals in Tableau and setting up experiences to allow you to interact with the tool in an entirely new way.

The Tableau Foundation deployed Zen Masters and software to
help fight Ebola

Tableau foundation began in 2012 and 2013 IPO of Tableau
created funding for the Foundation. Aim 'to encourage the use of facts and
analytical reasoning to solve the World's problems'. Does Mission Grants,
Community Grants, Disaster Response and Employee Service & Giving.

The President of Guinea said “the Tableau Foundation work
helped to transform the fight against Ebola”.

Volunteer network of Tableau experts eager to help
non-profits to do more with data.

Background: 1st outbreak in Guinea in December
2013. There have been c.3800 cases and c. 2800 deaths. The GDP per capita is
less than $500. There is a population of 10.5 million people

Electronic Data management and Contact Tracing was a big
step forward. Used basic smartphones to capture the data. Data was sent
straight back to the system so live updates were possible. It helps to increase
transparency around the tracing.

CommCare created a simplistic app to capture data and create
on the ground recommendations. Visualising the data was not the best so in
stepped Tableau.

Data flow was a daily upload that goes in to SQL Server and
the data was held on Tableau Server.

Data was not always as clean as hoped.
Training of colleagues was continual so this meant data quality was challenged
here as well. Transactional data also posed challenges. It was also in French
so that was added fun.

Cultural challenges was tough as trying to develop reporting
for use of those that haven’t had high reporting exposure adds to the
challenge.

Quick fire dashboards were the requirement rather than
running extensive usability testing.

Level of Detail would have made the transactional data a lot
easier to handle and measure but the team were using 8.2.

Scaffolding was used to get round date issues but adding a
data filter to look at whether the data was less than today to make sure the
records are reduced as much as possible.

Doctors used the dashboards to work out how to allocate
resources and could make as many data led decisions as much as possible because
if it wasn’t optimal more people would contract Ebola

It’s that time folks. Christian, Chris and the Devs are about to take the stage in the MGM arena where Tyson and the Stones have starred. Big expectations! I’ll blog summaries of all the sessions that I go to if you can’t make it (or can’t remember them due to your Vegas excesses). This is a stream of consciousness so apologies for the spelling mistakes and typos in advance.

Christian Chabot (CC)

8th annual customer conference

CC highlights the customer examples where the impacts of visualisations done everyday is making the world a better place through improving medicine, monitoring manta ray movement or childcare in local councils (Leicestershire County Council example).

Data is still growing and to help people everyone needs to become a ‘data person’.

La Nacion – “people don’t believe our journalists by what they write. They believe it because they can analyse the data themselves” all using Tableau. Showing the example that data is a way to empower people. “It’s not the people in power, it the power in the people that will change South America”.

Francois Ajenstat (FA)

“Tableau helps me be creative, even though I‘m not a creative person” – Ben at a retailer

This is the kick for the devs to keep making the software better

People who know the data should ask the questions – everyday people.

Software should be designed for deeper thinking – simple design shouldn’t mean simplistic.

Analytics at can drive change – data led collaboration can only exist when the software fits the culture of the company it is used in

More to be invested in R&D in the last 2 years than in the last 10

Developers on Stage is back!!

Areas of investment:

Data

Formatted spreadsheets with multiple tables in the sheet can now split out these tables using the Data Interpretor automatically

Date Wrangling - Tableau Public showed over 250 different were in use. More automatic data / time coversion as Tableau becomes more intelligent. Just change the data type to a ‘date’ or ‘date / time’ and Tableau converts funky formats

Union is here!!! Hover over the second data item over the first in the data preparation screen and new rows are added. Wildcard file names allows you to union lots of files all in a couple of clicks.

Cross Database Joins – Adding connections all in the data preparation screen, goodbye blending. Row level, live querying across multiple databases. Publishing the cross database joins can be published to the server

Visualisation

Tables – Highlight tables with totals are dominated by totals. Now able to unclick ‘show totals’ in the colour dialogue box. Totals can be moved from bottom to the top row, from the right side to the left side of the table.

Interactivity – Data Highlighter – on the marks card, drop the data field on the marks card and select ‘highlight selected’ and as you search the view changed on each letter to update the scatterplot. Add a data item to the ‘Data Highlighter’ and you can hover through a list and the screen will show the update as you go

Custom Territories – similar to using grouping but finds the outside of the mapping polygons as one shape.

Spatial data – New data connection group – ‘Spatial File’. New field type – ‘Geometry’ that loads as custom polygons on your map.

Mapbox integration – add Mapbox maps in just a few click. Can add custom layers to your maps.

Inserting charts in to Tooltips – in just a couple of clicks.

Analytics

Outlier Detection – Select multiple fields, right click and Create ‘Outlier Set’. Simply use as you would normal sets

Clustering – in analytics pane and drop it on the viz. Tableau works out the clustering and have even shown the cluster outliers. A group is created to capture the results of the cluster. Can drop additional metrics in to the clustering algorithm.

Drag and drop analytics – drag the reference band to colour and drop it to change the colours of the marks only with the reference band. Can drag reference lines to filters to filter up to that point

Self-service at Scale (to make all companies data driven)

New home page for every single user on Tableau Server. Collects your favourites and most visited views

Content Analytics – hover over the content you are interested in and it shows the consumption rates. Bar charts show content views etc

Server search – Thumbnails in the search. Results are ordered by views

Version Control in Tableau Server. Click on history and select the old version and it gets moved across. Tableau Server making it safe to change your mind

Permissions at the Project level – can manage permission at the project, workbook or data source owners. Project permissions can locked by the owner